Month: October 2009

Not yet carved in stone, but the current plan of the OpenMP Language Committee (LC) is to publish a draft OpenMP 3.1 standard for public comment by IWOMP 2010 and to have the OpenMP 3.1 specification finished for SC 2010 – given that the Architecture Review Board (ARB) accepts the new version. Bronis R. de Supinski (LLNL) has taken on the duty of acting as the chair of the LC and since introduced some process changes. Besides weekly telephone conference calls, there are three face-to-face meetings per year and attendance is required for voting rights. The first face-to-face meeting was held on June 1st and 2nd in Dresden attached to IWOMP 2009, the second one was on September 22nd and 23rd in Chicago. This blog post is intended to report on this last meeting and to present an overview of what is going on with OpenMP right now, obviously from my personal point of view.

In the course of resuming work on OpenMP after the 3.0 specification was published, the LC voted on the priority of (small) extensions and clarifications for 3.1 as well as new topics for 4.0. We ended up with 12 major topics and 5 subcommittees, as outlined in Bronis talk during IWOMP 2009, which are still in use as identifiers of the different topics people are working on.

1: Development of an OpenMP Error Model. This is the feature the LC people think OpenMP is missing most desperately, but in contrast to that it did not receive too much effort yet. A subcommittee has been formed to be lead by Tim Mattson (Intel) and Michael Wong (IBM), and currently there are three proposals on the table for discussion: (i) an extension of the API routines and some constructs to return error codes or the introduction of a global error indication variable, (ii) an exception-based mechanism to catch errors, and (iii) a callback-based mechanism allowing to react on errors based on the severity and origin. The absence of an error model is clearly a reason for not using OpenMP in applications with certain requirements on reliability, but introducing the wrong error model could easily spoil OpenMP for that audience. It seems that most LC people do not like error codes too much (I don’t either), using exceptions is not suitable for C and FORTRAN, so the third approach seems most promising by allowing a program to react on errors depending on the severity and to still allow the compiler to ignore OpenMP if it is not enabled. In fact, this mechanism has been proposed back in 2006 by Alex Duran (BSC) and friends already. Since nothing has been decided yet, I guess the error model is targeted for OpenMP 4.0.

2: Interoperability and Composability. This subcommittee is lead by myself (RWTH) and Bronis R. de Supinski (LLNL) and is looking for ways of allowing OpenMP to coexist with other threading packages, maybe even with other OpenMP runtime environments in the same application. We are also looking into how to allow the creation of parallel software components that can safely be plugged together, which I consider prominently missing in virtually all threading paradigms. This is a very broad topic and there is no OpenMP version number I would assign this topic as target for being solved to, but with a little bit of luck we can make some progress even for version 3.1. We have some ideas on the table of how to specify some basic aspects of OpenMP interacting with the native threading packages (POSIX-Threads on Linux/Unix, Win32-Threads on Windows), driven by application observations and known deficiencies in current OpenMP implementations. We might also attack the problem of orphaned reductions. I am not so certain of solving the issue of allowing or detecting nested Worksharing constructs, respectively.

3: Incorporating Tools Support into the OpenMP Specification. This has been on the feature wishlist for OpenMP 3.0 already, but there is hardly any activity regarding this topic. Most vendors provide their own tools to analyze the performance (or correctness) of OpenMP programs by making their own runtime talk to their specific tool, but this situation is far from optimal for research / academia tools. As early as back in 2004 there were some proposal (i.e. POMP by Bernd Mohr and friends), but they did not made it into the specification or into actual implementations.

4: Associating Computation or Memory across Workshares. Today, the world of OpenMP is flat (memory), so this topic is mostly about supporting cc-NUMA architectures in OpenMP. There are two subcommittees working on this issue, the first is lead by Dieter an Mey (RWTH) and the goal is to standardize common practices (used in today’s applications) of dealing with cc-NUMA optimizations. If nothing comes in between, OpenMP 3.1 will allow the user to bind threads to cores by either specifying an explicit mapping, or by telling the runtime a strategy (like compact vs. scatter). Of course there are more ideas (and features needed), like influencing the memory allocation scheme or using page migration if supported by the operating system or interacting with resource management systems (batch queuing systems), but these are very hard to specify in a portable and extensible fashion. The other subcommittee is lead by Barbara Chapman (UH) and deals with thread team control. Using the Worksharing in OpenMP, it is very hard to dedicate a special task (i.e. I/O) to just one thread of the Parallel Region. There are applications asking for that, but I don’t see a proposal that the LC would agree on for 3.1. Nevertheless, they presented some interesting ideas at the last F2F based based on HPCS language capabilities, which hopefully have the potential to influence OpenMP 4.0.

5: Accelerators, GPUs and More. Of course we have to follow the trend / hype😉. But since no one knows for sure in which directions the hardware is evolving, there are so many different ideas on how to deal with this. Out of my head I can enumerate that PGI has some directives loosely based on OpenMP Worksharing (plus they have CUDA for FORTRAN), IBM has OpenMP for cell with several ideas on extensions, BSC has a proposal that is in principle based on their *SS concept, and CAPS Entreprise has the HMPP constructs + compiler. In summary: No clear direction yet, nothing for OpenMP in the scope of 3.1.

6: Transactional Memory and Thread Level Speculation. Some people thought that OpenMP might need something for Transactional Memory. To the best of my knowledge no one from the LC did any work on this regard.

7: Refinements to the OpenMP Tasking Model. There are two things that most people agree Tasks are missing: Dependencies and Reductions. With respect to the former, there were three proposals on the table from Grant Haab (Intel), Federico Massaioli (Caspur) and Alex Duran (BSC) and the BSC proposal looks most promising because it avoid deadlocks. It employs existing program variables to define the dependencies between tasks, i.e. the result of a computation can be the input of another task. With a good portion of luck, Task Dependencies could actually make it into OpenMP 3.1, I think. With respect to the latter thing, namely Task Reductions, there has been only little progress so far.

8: Extending OpenMP to C++0x and FORTRAN 2003. Since the C++0x standard dropped Concepts, the work that Michael Wong (IBM) and myself (RWTH) made so far became obsolete. To the best of my knowledge there has been no progress made with respect to investigate the opportunities or issues that could arise with FORTRAN 2003.

9: Extending OpenMP to Additional Languages. Well, there are Java and C#, and at least for Java there are some implementations of OpenMP available (incomplete, though). Anyhow, there was never any real attempt to write a formal specification of OpenMP for Java, nor for C#, and I don’t think there is one now.

10: Clarifications to the Existing Specifications. The LC already approved several minor corrections (i.e. mistakes in the examples, improvements in the wording, and the like) that will make their way into OpenMP 3.1. Nothing spectacular, though, but this is something that has to be done.

11: Miscellaneous Extensions. I might be wrong, but I think that User-defined Reductions (UDR) belong to this topic. Yes, there is a chance that UDRs will make it into OpenMP 3.1! This will bring obvious things like min and max for C and C++, but we are aiming higher: The goal is to enable the programmer to write any type of reduction operation for any type in the base language (including non-PODs) and this is achieved by introducing an OpenMP declare statement to define a reduction operation that can be specified in a reduction clause. There are two problems that are under discussion right now: (i) C++ templates and (ii) pointers / arrays. The first can be addressed by an extension of the current proposal and I got the feeling that most LC people like the new approach, but the second is a bit more complex. If you want to reduce an array that is described by a pointer, you need to know how much space to allocate for the thread private copy and how many elements the array consists of. There has been some discussion on this, but no strong agreement on how to solve this issue in general, as it also arises with the private, firstprivate, … clauses. We only agreed that we need a one-fits-all solution. With some good portion of luck we can solve this issue, otherwise we hopefully get UDRs with some limitations in OpenMP 3.1 and the full functionality in a later version of the specification.

12: Additional Task / Threads Synchronization Mechanisms. Again I might be wrong, but I think that the Atomic Extension proposal by Grant Haab (Intel) belongs in here. This is a feature you will also find in threading-aware languages (such as C++0x), but the current base languages of OpenMP are not of that kind. This will almost certainly make it into OpenMP 3.1 and will allow for a portable way to write atomic updates that capture a value and atomic writes. This is already supported by most machines and using an atomic operations can be so much more efficient than using a Critical Region.

If you are interested in more details, you are invited to stop by the OpenMP booth at SC 2009 in Portland and ask the nice guy on booth duty some good questions🙂.